The category of autonomous robotic devices includes, among other things, autonomous vehicles of various sizes for transporting passengers and goods, pilotless airplanes and ships, drones, home robots, delivery robots, devices for indoor and outdoor cleaning, maintenance, construction and manufacturing.
The sensory systems for such devices include sensors for acquisition of data reflecting the properties of the surrounding environment and a processing unit for analyzing the measurements of the sensors and making decisions based on the measurements. Analyses and decision making has proven to be a long standing challenge for programmers and hardware manufacturers. Exponential progress in the fields of computational and sensor electronics, robotics and algorithms has resulted in successful solutions to some long standing challenges in the field of autonomous robot navigation.
Known solutions make use of mono and stereo vision sensors, active and passive RADAR (radio-wave detection and ranging), LIDAR (light distance and ranging), SONAR (sound navigation and ranging), touch sensors and other sensors.
However the autonomous robot device industry is yet in its infancy and a lot of progress is required to create truly useful, reliable and efficient autonomous robotic devices.